Approaching the Main Questions

Postmodernism/Postmodernity is associated with an awareness of societal and cultural transitions after World War II
and the rise of mass-mediated consumerist popular culture in the 1960s-1970s. In culture and the arts, interpreters of
this era describe the kinds of cultural hybrids that emerge from mixing (or rendering inoperative) the categories of
"high" and "low" cultures, and hybrids in cultural forms that have developed in regions where local identities seek
definition against, or in dialog with, Western "hegemonic" cultures (the mixing of "official" cultures and those defined
as "other" in modernist ideologies). Postmodern views of history and national identity typically cancel a commitment
to modern "master narratives" or "metanarratives" like progress and goal-directed history, and disrupt myths of
national and ethnic identities as "natural" foundations of "unity."
Complicating the study of "postmodernism" is the wide range of terms and assumptions in statements and arguments
from different schools of thought and movements in the arts. In all the discourse, we need to differentiate the terms
and concepts of the postmodern (as a condition of a historical era) orpostmodernity (as simply what we are in whether
we know it or not), andpostmodernism (reflected in movements with varying levels of intention and self-awareness),
When interpreters of culture discuss postmodern strategies or features in architecture, literature, philosophy, and the
arts, this usually includes uses of irony, parody, sampling, mixing "high" and "low" (popular) cultural sources, horizontal
vs. vertical analysis, and mixing historical and cultural sources and styles. The view that cultural hierarchies (high/low;
official/local; dominant culture/subcultures) are unstable and constructed and that history is not a source of authority
underlies the creation of many forms of pastiche (combinations from unrelated sources), collage, parody, and nostalgic
stylization where earlier, historically situated styles are abstracted and imitated as stylization.
Some scholars see the macro context of "the postmodern condition" within functions of globalization and the
information/network society. The global economic system since the 1960s has moved toward the international
merging of cultures and the global marketing of cultural goods.
Many see the features of postmodernism that are associated with the self-reflexive critique of society, culture, politics,
and economics as already part of modernism, and thus an extension of "modernism." But whatever the phase of
"modernity" we accept now includes abandoning the hope or belief in the necessary progressive movement of history
toward a goal, an end, a fulfillment.
The post-postmodern viewpoint (wherever we are today after having absorbed the issues in postmodernism) seems
to be taking the "postmodern condition" (postmodernity) as a given and creating new remixed works disassociated
from the modern-postmodern arguments and oppositions. The post-postmodern takes the "always already" mixed
condition of sources, identities, and new works as a given, not a question or problem. The metaphors of "network" and
"convergence" in creative subcultures (e.g., musicians, artists, designers, writers) are seen to be live operations or
conditions received and re-performed, not just abstractions. From this more recent perspective, living in remixed
hybridity is thus obligatory, not a choice, since it is the foundation for participating in a living, networked, globally
connected culture.
We could also argue that the terms in the discourses about the postmodern are no longer be useful, or need to be
redefined to be useful for today. Either way, the point is thinking through the problems and seeing if there are terms
that do useful cultural work for us.

Primary Problem:
Constructing Trajectories of History and Culture
Talking about "the postmodern" or "postmodernism" presupposes there is/was something known as "modernism"
from which, or against which, something can be "post".
For philosophers, historians, artists, and theorists who have developed arguments about these historical moments or
movements, "Modernism/ Modernity" and "Postmodernism" are all caught up in a web of discourses with assumptions
and ideologies that need a self-reflexive critique.

Much of the debate presupposes the possibility of a critique of history, conceptualized as having a trajectory, goal, end
(telos > teleology), which was, or was not, fulfilled in the modernist philosophies, hopes, and aspirations of the 1930s1950s.
And since around 2000, a new debate on the "post-postmodern" has opened up. There is a shared sense in many areas
of cultural practice and university research that many of the issues in postmodernism are over or assumed, and the we
are now in a different global moment, however that it to define.

What was Modernism?

As we know, each discourse concerned with history constructs its own historical objects. Postmodern theory
constructs an image of modernism. Was there ever a pre-postmodern consensus about history, identity, core cultural
values?

Differentiations:
the idea of the postmodern or postmodernity as anhistorical condition or
position (political/ economic/ social), an era we're still supposedly in regardless
of anyone's state of awareness.
vs. an intentional movement in the arts, culture, philosophy, and politics that
uses various strategies to subvert what is seen as dominant in modernism or
modernity.

Jean-Franois Lyotard:
"Simplifying to the extreme, I define the postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives."
The postmodern as a historical/cultural "condition" based on a dissolution of master narratives or metanarratives
(totalizing narrative paradigms like progress and national histories), a crisis in ideology when ideology no longer seems
transparent but contingent and constructed (see The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge).

Frederic Jameson:
Postmodernism as a movement in arts and culture corresponding to a new configuration of politics and economics,
"late capitalism": transnational consumer economies based on global scope of capitalism (See Postmodernism, or The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism).

Post-Modern Artists' views:

Postmodernity as a phase of knowing and practice, abandoning the assumptions, prejudices, and constraints of
modernism to embrace the contradictions, irony, and profusion of pop and mass culture. "High" and "low" culture/art
categories made useless and irrelevant, art from outsider and non-Western cultures embraced, consumer society
turned inside out. The grand linear narrative of art history and Western cultural history is exposed as ideological and
constructed for class interests.

The Postmodern and Globalization

From Homi Bhabha, "The Location of Culture"

If the jargon of our times - postmodernity, postcoloniality, postfeminism - has any meaning at all, it
does not lie in the popular use of the 'post' to indicate sequentiality - after-feminism; or polarity - antimodernism. These terms that insistently gesture to the beyond, only embody its restless and
revisionary energy if they transform the present into an expanded and ex-centric site of experience
and empowerment.
....
The wider significance of the postmodern condition lies in the awareness that the epistemological

'limits' of those ethnocentric ideas are also the enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant,
even dissident histories and voices - women, the colonized, minority groups, the bearers of policed
sexualities.
....
The very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of
historical traditions, or 'organic' ethnic communities - as the grounds of cultural comparativism - are in
a profound process of redefinition.